Windows Servers - Monitoring and Automating

In addition to Windows-specific metrics, users can also configure Linked and Aggregate metrics. Linked metrics allow for consumption of another resource's metrics alongside metrics from the monitored server in order to be able to holistically evaluate conditions across multiple resources. For example, it maybe useful to link website uptime status metric and evaluate it alongside IIS queued requests in order to decide when to recycle web app pool.

Special note: aggregation of metrics is available in all but Starter plans.

ResourceStatus

string

Metric that identifies the last state of the monitored server. Possible values are: Ready, Down, or Unknown. ResourceStatus is tracked as Ready when there is agent data found during a monitoring cycle. ResourceStatus is marked as Unknown when there is no agent data found during a monitoring cycle.

ScheduledTaskLastRunInMinutes

decimal

Metric that tracks number of minutes since a particular Windows scheduled task has last executed.

ScheduledTaskLastStatus

int

Metric that tracks the last status of a particular Windows scheduled task. Status of 0 indicates a successful run. For a list of all possible statuses, read here.

WindowsEventLogEntry

object

Metric that tracks entries from the Windows Event Log. This is an object-based metric and not a single value (scalar) metric. This metric has a number of properties

EventId - (int) ID of the Event Log entry

MachineName - (string) host name of the server that generated the error

Message - (string) actual message of the event

Source - (string) application/service that generated the event

UserName - (string) user under who the log entry was generated

Timestamp - (datetime) local time when the log entry was generated

Metrics tracking WindowsEventLogEntry must be pre-aggregated before they can be evaluated by either alert or scaling engines.

WindowsPerformanceCounter

decimal

Probably one of the most popular Windows metric types. Windows OS itself and various applications that run on it, publish a very large number of performance counters that highlight various aspects of performance indicators, health, uptime, and other characteristics. CloudMonix can track any published performance counter. Each performance counter that CloudMonix should track must be defined as an individual metric.

WindowsProcessList

object list

Metric that tracks a list of currently running processes. This is an array of object metric. This metric contains a list of objects with the following properties

Name - (string) windows process name

IsResponding - (boolean) indicator if the process is able to respond or is hung

Metric that tracks WindowsProcessList must be pre-aggregated before it can be evaluated by alert or a scaling engines.

WindowsServiceState

string

Metric that tracks the last known status of a particular Windows service. Possible values are Running, Stopped, Stopping, Paused, Pausing.

Windows Server Actions

When particular conditions arise, it maybe necessary to kick off a self-healing PowerShell script to stabilize the system. This provides ability for CloudMonix users to instrument a very particular custom action when specific monitoring conditions occur.

Actions are only available for CloudMonix customers subscribing to Ultimate plan or during the trial.

CustomPowershellScript

When action is kicked off, CloudMonix will execute a fully custom PowerShell script specified during action execution on the target VM

PowershellRestartService

When action is kicked off, CloudMonix will request that a specified Windows Service is restarted on a particular VM